I started in the music business I was first introduced to 1650 Broadway, uh, which was in reality where everything happened in the ’60s.
AL KOOPERAnd he was about my age, and he just, that finished off my guitar career, just like that, in one afternoon.
More Al Kooper Quotes
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At the end of the playback of the take of “Like A Rolling Stone”, or actually during the thing.
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Every now and then we could steal somebody else’s stuff.
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And a little slate that came out of the wall that you could actually write on. And a door that locked from the outside.
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In the, uh, ’30s and ’40s, the Brill Building was the hub of, uh, musical activity in Tin Pan Alley in New York City.
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Mike Bloomfield sat down and started playing, and I went, whoa! Because I had never heard any white person play like that before.
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Still being ambitious to want to play on the record, I was a mediocre keyboard player. And uh, I seized the opportunity and played the organ.
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And he was about my age, and he just, that finished off my guitar career, just like that, in one afternoon.
AL KOOPER -
The place that I worked I used to joke about it. There was a, every morning at 10:30 I’d come into work and I’d go into this cubicle that had a little upright piano and fake white cork bricks on the wall.
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Only through sheer ambition did I end up playing on [Bob Dylan sessions] and the fact that I could do that is a testament to how disorganized it really was.
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Musically Bob [Dylan] is a primitive. He’s not a Gershwin, or somebody that uses eloquent music terms.
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I believe Irving Berlin was there, and uh, and everything just centered around there.
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The first generation from the ’50s that were in 1650 [Broadway] were pretty much all crooks,
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You couldn’t help being influenced by Dylan.
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I mean just out and out crooks. And the next generation had a little more finesse. But I mean those first wave of people, you know, definitely would take all your money, no doubt about it.
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I don’t care, turn the organ up, and that’s really how I became an organ player.
AL KOOPER